Hannah Arendt’s Draft of History

The first page of Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” typescript, with edits by William Shawn.
(New Yorker records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.)

On April 15, 1962, Hannah Arendt sent a brief personal note to William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, thanking him for some flowers he had sent. It had been a rough winter for the political philosopher: Her husband, Heinrich Blücher, was suffering from a brain aneurysm, and Arendt had developed a severe allergic reaction to antibiotics she was given to treat a cold. Then, in March, a truck had plowed into a taxi she was taking through Central Park, resulting in a concussion, hemorrhages in both eyes, broken teeth, and fractured ribs. Nevertheless, in her note three weeks later to Shawn—who had assigned her to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem a year before, and was still awaiting her copy—Arendt sounded almost chirpy. “I am much better,” she wrote, in her blue-ballpoint cursive, spidery and cramped on cream-colored stationery, “and on the point of going back to work.”

Five months later, she was done. On Sept. 19, a sheaf of onion-skin pages arrived at TheNew Yorker’s office at 25 West 43rd Street, with the title, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report.” The manuscript was sent over to the typing pool, where it was copied onto heavy yellow bond, double-spaced, and then returned to Shawn for editing.

Meanwhile, a carbon copy was delivered to Arendt’s publisher, Viking Press. A lightly edited version of her manuscript was published as a book in May 1963 under the same title she’d picked for the New Yorkerarticles that were published in February and March but with the dramatically enhanced subtitle “A Report on the Banality of Evil.” The book, with revisions, has remained in print since. But it never reflected Shawn’s changes to Arendt’s draft, which was serialized in five issues of the magazine. So while The New Yorker remains almost reflexively associated with “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” the text that most people have in mind when they talk about Arendt’s report is not, in fact, the one that appeared in the magazine.

The Shawn typescript, cluttered with pencil marks, is now held with the rest of The New Yorkerarchive at the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library. His major cuts and alterations to Arendt’s original are striking in their consistency: Almost all of them involve Arendt’s asides about the contemporary Jewish community and its handling of the trial. Many of the most controversial passages made it into the magazine intact, including her assertion that “if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between five and six million people.” But the final magazine text is in some ways less provocative, more streamlined, and—unsurprisingly, given the precision of The New Yorker’s legendary copy editor Eleanor Gould—more polished than what’s in the book.

In one sense, Shawn was simply exercising his preference for straightforward structure and well-modulated language: The sections cut from the magazine, especially near the beginning, are generally asides that distract the reader from the central focus of the Eichmann narrative. In some places, he reined Arendt in, softening her claim that Hitler was, in 1935, “admired everywhere as a great national statesman” with a judiciously placed “almost” before “everywhere.” But the cuts also reflect Shawn’s aversion to what Irving Howe, in his criticism of Arendt in Commentary, self-deprecatingly described as the “grubby” polemic of the little intellectual journals. (Ben Yagoda, in his New Yorker chronicle, About Town, noted that Arendt went to Shawn for the assignment on the advice of her friend Mary McCarthy only after Norman Podhoretz told her Commentary couldn’t afford to send her to Jerusalem; given that Podhoretz responded to Arendt’s finished piece with a scathing review subtitled “A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance,” one can only imagine that the final product would have been quite different had Arendt been writing for him.)

Arendt doesn’t appear to have fussed over the cuts. “She did not like to look at things, or go back to things,” explained Jerome Kohn, Arendt’s former research assistant and now her literary executor. “What she gave to Shawn she left in his hands, and what she sent to the publisher, she left in theirs.” She did, however, send in corrections, and requested multiple sets of galleys during editing. “It would make things easier for me,” she wrote to Shawn on Sept. 30, 1962. After the first installment of the series was published, the following February, she wrote to chastise Shawn for an error she had found in the text concerning the date of Yad Vashem’s establishment. “This is an error,” Arendt wrote, noting she had spoken to the fact-checker, William Honan, who went on to be a culture editor at the New York Times. “This is not very important but it confirms my conviction that no dates or facts provided by your checking department should be inserted unless they are checked and approved by me.”

The date of Yad Vashem’s founding turned out to be the least of it, of course. According to Arendt’s biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Shawn cabled Arendt on March 8 to advise her of the response to her piece: “People in town seem to be discussing little else.” A few days later, on March 13, she replied that she had begun receiving angry letters. “Now the Jews know that enemy No. 1 is not ‘the German’ and the Germans agree that enemy No. 1 is not ‘the Jew,’ it is me,” Arendt wrote, in a letter held at the Library of Congress. “This, to be sure, is an exaggeration and your checking department would not let me get away with it.”

Allison Hoffman is a senior editor at Tablet Magazine. Her Twitter feed is @allisont_dc.

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At the time Arendt wrote about Eichmann and condemned the Jewish officials for their “cooperation” with the Nazis, an accusation that some well respectable historians that should have known better supported and took up again even years later, the seriousness and durability of her relationship to Heidegger were not yet generally known.

Read Gershom Sholem’s “On Jews and Judaism in Crisis.” Schocken, 1976. His Letter to Hannah Arendt, p. 300, is the last item in the book.

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Pages from the New Yorker typescript of Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem

Arendt’s article was formally accepted November 4, 1962, and returned to the make-up department with Shawn’s handwritten changes annotated in pencil; a label was affixed to the back of first page with the instruction “MG Soon”: Must Go Soon. (PDF)

The pieces were initially slated to run in four parts. Shawn asked Arendt to send him an epilogue, delivered in mid-November, that became the fifth and final part of the New Yorker series—and, eventually, the portion Ha’aretz chose to excerpt for its Israeli audience. (PDF)

Arendt’s text, and her book, begins with a stentorian shout: “Beth Hamishpath—the House of Justice.” It’s strikingly immediate, almost audible even in print, and a remarkably effective journalistic trick for an academic writer. But it broke the cardinal rule of New Yorker style: avoid “indirection,” or non-declarative introductions of places, people, or objects. Shawn initially fixed the problem by adding “the words,” while the final version is even more muted. (PDF)

In her discussion about the demands of justice, Arendt included an aside giving the Eichmann trial’s presiding judge, Moshe Landau, a backhanded compliment: he had accepted a trip to the United States after the trial underwritten by Jewish organizations, but at least he kept quiet about it. Shawn neatly sliced it out of the text. (PDF)

Shawn cut a long tangent considering the question of Israel’s identity as a Jewish state, in which Arendt—in what turns out to have been a prescient, if impolitic, line of argument—explored the practical difficulties of organizing a modern civil infrastructure along ethno-religious lines. The typescript indicates that Shawn began adding minor copy-edits to the first few lines before deciding to expunge the whole section. (PDF)

Shawn cut a long tangent considering the question of Israel’s identity as a Jewish state, in which Arendt—in what turns out to have been a prescient, if impolitic, line of argument—explored the practical difficulties of organizing a modern civil infrastructure along ethno-religious lines. The typescript indicates that Shawn began adding minor copy-edits to the first few lines before deciding to expunge the whole section. (PDF)

Shawn cut a long tangent considering the question of Israel’s identity as a Jewish state, in which Arendt—in what turns out to have been a prescient, if impolitic, line of argument—explored the practical difficulties of organizing a modern civil infrastructure along ethno-religious lines. The typescript indicates that Shawn began adding minor copy-edits to the first few lines before deciding to expunge the whole section. (PDF)

Again, Shawn—after making a few copy-edits—decided to lose Arendt’s brief consideration of Jewish peoplehood. More striking here, though, is a rare instance in which his editing actually changed the meaning of a sentence. Arendt’s claim, left intact in her book, was that “it was not only German Jewry who underestimated their enemies.” In the magazine, the claim focused on German Jews alone, foreclosing consideration of whether Jews elsewhere in the Diaspora shared in the same mistakes. (PDF)

Again, Shawn—after making a few copy-edits—decided to lose Arendt’s brief consideration of Jewish peoplehood. More striking here, though, is a rare instance in which his editing actually changed the meaning of a sentence. Arendt’s claim, left intact in her book, was that “it was not only German Jewry who underestimated their enemies.” In the magazine, the claim focused on German Jews alone, foreclosing consideration of whether Jews elsewhere in the Diaspora shared in the same mistakes. (PDF)

In this passage—one of the places where Arendt, in her manuscript, comes off as overly credulous of Eichmann’s excuses about his ideological commitment to the Nazi project—Shawn, following journalistic convention, reworked the attribution to subtly introduce an element of doubt. Rather than following Arendt’s bald assertion, on Eichmann’s behalf, that “as far as he was concerned, it was all a misunderstanding,” Shawn explicitly cited Eichmann’s testimony, twice, allowing for the possibility that the explanation Eichmann offered at trial might be distinct from the truth. (PDF)

Arendt, in places, could be too clever by half—as here, where she editorializes that Eichmann’s police interviews could provide rich material for a psychologist, a character conjured up to jokily drive home her point that humans can find humor in things that are morally horrible. Shawn took out the imaginary shrink and made the point straightforward: “…the horrible can sometimes be not only ludicrous but downright funny.” (PDF)

Here, Arendt wanders into an argumentative eddy, briefly considering the question of whether Eichmann’s defense lawyer, Robert Servatius, had engaged in professionally suspect conduct in hopes of making money off his role in the trial, and his contentious relationship with the Israeli government, which was responsible for paying his salary. Shawn’s initial edit—a straight cut—was later modified to address the question of how much he was paid, but the question of his possible ulterior motives disappeared from the finished work. (PDF)

Here, Arendt wanders into an argumentative eddy, briefly considering the question of whether Eichmann’s defense lawyer, Robert Servatius, had engaged in professionally suspect conduct in hopes of making money off his role in the trial, and his contentious relationship with the Israeli government, which was responsible for paying his salary. Shawn’s initial edit—a straight cut—was later modified to address the question of how much he was paid, but the question of his possible ulterior motives disappeared from the finished work. (PDF)